1. Field of the Invention (Technical Field)
This invention relates to the field of Emergency Management Programs; more particularly, the invention relates to the design and implementation of a system and method for inputting, analyzing, and disseminating information necessary to respond under time-constrained emergency events or hazardous situations. This invention may be used to provide consistency and integration among several groups and individuals, and may be used for both initial consequence-based decisions and follow-on consequence-based decisions.
2. Background Art
Increasingly households, warehouses, laboratories, manufacturing facilities, and municipalities and other governmental entities have been implementing comprehensive Emergency Management Programs (EMP) or Emergency Management Systems (EMS). These programs or systems are designed to provide persons responsible for dangerous or hazardous materials or conditions with the tools and processes necessary to respond quickly and proportionally to the risks associated with those materials or conditions. The risks present with certain materials or conditions may include risk to human life, the risk of contamination and pollution, or the risk to property or other assets. The risk caused by hazardous materials, both accidental and deliberate, for example through an act of terrorism, has become particularly more important in the United States and in other countries. Programs must provide the ability to make time-critical decisions to protect lives, assets and to prevent further damage caused by non-proportional response. One example of the types of programs employed in the past is embodied in the United States Department of Energy's (US DOE) Order No. 151.1, and the accompanying guidelines (See www.oa.doe.gov/emo/documents.html).
Often with these programs there are multiple persons or groups that are part of the response team and who are responsible for implementing the program procedures. These persons or groups often are presented with varying levels of information, at varyingly different times, and in extremely different environments. One example where this problem typically occurs is when a group of individuals with responsibilities for responding to an emergency event or other hazardous situation, herein referred to as a Consequence Assessment Team, has been organized to provide guidance to decision-makers and for controlling damage caused by the event. The Consequence Assessment Team typically receives information in piecemeal fashion from other persons or groups involved in the processes, sometimes with disparate variances, and under conditions that may not require an immediate decision to prevent loss of life. In contrast, an Incident Commander, who is one type of decision-maker often present at the scene of an emergency event, frequently has less than five minutes to make a decision in order to prevent loss of life or other losses from occurring after the time he or she arrives at the site. The Incident Commander often has limited tools for assessing the data, and inadequate time for independent analysis even if all the necessary data is provided in time. Furthermore, the Incident Commander, as well as other individuals who make initial decisions, often has a significant impact on the overall response to the event, and their decisions form the basis for many subsequent decisions. The different persons and groups who provide the Consequence Assessment Team with information often have widely disparate goals, and are provided with different sets of emergency event information that are tailored only to meet those goals, and also have less experience or formal training with respect to the critical decisions they are required to make.
Thus, problems exists with current structured EMP and EMS plans, because the information is either gathered or provided in a way that is inefficient and potentially fatal to at least one person or group requiring that information. This problem causes wide disparity in the magnitude of reaction, ranging anywhere from ordering a complete evacuation within a 10-mile radius, to ordering no evacuation at all, possibly under the exact same conditions. Additionally, the appropriate persons to serve on the Consequence Assessment Team are not included in the design and implementation process, and therefore the constraints placed on the individual or group decision-makers is not taken into consideration. Currently, very few EMP's require communication with local fire, police or other municipal emergency and rescue departments, or are required to consider the restraints, conditions and goals specific to each of these departments. Thus, inconsistent activity among the varying persons and groups is a common problem to the design and implementation of EMP or EMS systems and methods.
These prior art systems and methods have in the past been focused first on data and data-analysis tools and only secondarily on the needs of the ultimate decision-makers, if at all. Because the focus has been primarily on the accuracy and reliability of the information that is provided to the decision-makers, the tools and methods made available were all limited to the format in which the information reasonably could be provided. However, when the Incident Commander arrives at a site, where conditions such as poisonous vapors, open flames, or even explosions may be present, there is no time or place to open a set of building plans or read through multiple pages of plume diagrams. The analysis must be appropriately fashioned to match the individuals' response time and environmental constraints, as well as the individual or group responsibilities, or else it becomes ineffective. Tools provided to assess the level of risk and minimize losses must also be tailored for the decision-maker, and not simply designed to provide the raw data collected by individuals or groups unassociated with the decision-maker. Furthermore, the prior art systems and methods rely on independently maintained information sets, tools and processes, which rapidly become inconsistent and may lead to increased inefficiency, or even compound the risk created by the emergency event or hazardous situation. Therefore, these prior art systems and methods demonstrate additional problems, and the need arises for providing effective tools for key identified decision-makers.
Yet another problem with current systems and methods is the scale for which they are provided. Many systems are designed only for a single building or site location, which fail to address other settings of emergencies. One example of an emergency event unsuited for these prior art systems is a release of hazardous materials on a public highway or a body of water. The range of responses that earlier systems are designed to provide are often limited by the low number of variables or conditions present in the information set. Most of these prior art systems do not consider the combination of multiple events when designing or implementing their program. These prior art systems and methods are particularly inappropriate for responding to terrorist activity, which may be coordinated to expose a large geographical area, or a number of discrete locations far removed from one another. Another problem present in the prior art, particularly in computer-based solutions, is the possible presence of an uncontrolled electro-magnetic field, which could entirely prevent or greatly reduce availability to the information on wireless or hardwired network devices. The prior art computer-based solutions are often inappropriate for particular decision-makers, who may not be familiar with the format of data presented, or who may be unable to quickly and easily extract the information from the electronic devices due to the size of the font on the graphic display coupled with the presence of vapors, including smoke, pervasive throughout the environment in which they are required to make the decision.
These and other problems exist in the current technology associated with designing and implementing Emergency Management Programs and Systems. Thus, a need arises in providing a system and method for designing and implementing such a program that ensures that reliable and relevant data is accessible to all decision-makers, that allows for decisions based on a consistent set of information, that allows the information and processes for using that information to be integrated horizontally and vertically amongst the varying individual and group decision-makers, that provides tools for quickly and efficiently viewing and manipulating the information appropriate for each decision-maker, and that otherwise eliminates the problems with prior art systems identified above.